District 5 Diary

Rob Anderson's commentary on San Francisco politics from District 5

Sunday, February 08, 2015

Where's the bicycle count report?

A reader writes:

Rob,

I went to SFMTA site and couldn't find a 2014 Bicycle Count Report. Where is it? Has there been a decrease in bicycle ridership that MTA is afraid to report? Later: I downloaded the Bicycle Count reports from 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013. So from 2011 they are releasing reports every other year.

Rob's comment:

Good question. I asked the MTA the same question recently and got a murky response. They did change the month of the count a few years ago from August to September, with the reports then published in December. I have hard copies of all the count reports from 2007 to the last count, but I don't have one for 2012.

I don't remember any announcement about doing the count every other year; I guess I missed it.

You have a right to be suspicious, since the city now has a serious credibility problem with how it counts injury accidents to cyclists. Take what used to be the MTA's annual Collisions Report; the last one was issued way back in August, 2012, four months before that UC study was published that put the city's method of counting cycling accidents in question (there's an earlier UC study that raises the same question about counting pedestrian accidents).

Instead of coming clean about the accident counting issue, the city has simply not published the Collisions Report the last two years.

It's interesting to speculate about when riding a bike San Francisco will reach some kind of plateau, like it has in Portland and Vancouver. Portland's bike commute has been stuck at 6% for years. San Francisco, on the other hand, already seems stuck at less than 4%(page 4). See also page 3 of the "updated" Transportation Fact Sheet, which tells us that commuting by bike in this city has only increased from 2% in 2000 to 3.6% in 2012.

Brenda's

I've only been there a couple of times, but the new Brenda's on Diviz easily has the best breakfast in the neighborhood. (It's nice to have the jam in a container on the table, not in those little plastic packets.)

My only gripe: the volume of the music. This is a mystifying but common practice in busy local restaurants. When the place is crowded with talkative people already struggling to be heard over the din, why insist on background music at all? I love the blues, but not cranked up to white noise level in an environment where conversation is already difficult.